


Outsider

by waterbird13



Series: Tumblr Fics [434]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Not Belonging, Outsider - Freeform, discomfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 01:49:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11048775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: Jo just has a hard time belonging to the places her Mom wishes she could.





	Outsider

All she’s learned about normality has been from half-hearted lessons her mother tries to impart and TV. Needless to say, it’s not the world’s best preparation.

At least it’s community college, so she can go home after and not see any of these people again for days if not longer. And she’s getting an education, which, while not her own highest goal maybe, is something her mother always dreamed of, and Jo has a hard time telling her mom no.

She’s weird. She’s an outsider, doesn’t belong in the groups going to bars on Friday or coffee shops before class. She vets her dates with holy water and wouldn’t know a study group if it bit her in the ass.

Still, there are weird people everywhere. And the most obvious qualities about herself–that she knows more about cheap beer than ten college kids put together and can load a shotgun blindfolded–are marketable skills. Some of her professors would call them that. Marketable.

Not socially acceptable, sure. But marketable. She figures that has to be enough.

And the other skills–the hunting knowledge she’s picked up without her mother’s consent around the Roadhouse, her unerring knowledge about something about something everywhere in the continental US–well, those are actually, she’s discovered, academic. Marketable, indeed.

So, really, it’s not great but it’s not bad, and nothing goes wrong until she’s startled by a guy about her age grabbing her shoulder after class.

He was brave and wanted to invite her to coffee with him and everyone else. He gets a knife pressed to his neck.

She drops out before the school can file charges or make any sort of fuss at all, the sort of thing the Roadhouse doesn’t need. Ellen doesn’t notice for a week.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” She asks, arms crossed, watching Jo clean glasses.

Jo knows that Ellen knows that she damn well should be. Mothers know.

“Not going anymore,” she says.

“And why the hell not?”

“It’s not for me,” she says.

She was on-track for a four-oh this semester. She had no friends, no idea how to go about making them. She almost stabbed a guy.

“Just didn’t belong there,” she says, setting the glass aside and reaching for the next one.


End file.
